President Donald Trump has ordered a halt to the U.S. Diversity Visa Lottery program following a deadly shooting at Brown University last week that left two people dead, a move his administration says is tied to renewed concerns over immigration vetting and national security.
Authorities said the suspect, a Portuguese national who was found dead on Thursday, had entered the United States in 2017 through the Diversity Visa lottery program and later obtained lawful permanent resident status or informally, a green card.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on X that the visa program has been put on hold at President Trump’s direction to “ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
U.S. officials also said they suspect the 48-year-old man, identified as Claudio Neves Valente, was responsible for the killing of Nuno Loureiro, a Portuguese professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earlier this week.
The Diversity Visa program offers up to 50,000 green cards each year through a lottery system open to applicants from countries with historically low levels of immigration to the United States. In a post on social media, Noem said Trump had earlier “fought to end” the program in 2017, after a truck-ramming attack in New York City killed eight people.
Noem said the 2017 New York attack was carried out by Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national and Islamic State supporter who entered the United States through the DV1 lottery program and is now serving multiple life sentences.
Her remarks came just hours after Neves Valente was found dead inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, in what police believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Police said surveillance footage and information from the public helped lead investigators to a car rental facility, where records pointed them to the suspect and confirmed his identity after a six-day, multi-state search.
Authorities later found him dead, along with a satchel and two firearms. Items recovered from a nearby vehicle were linked to the Brown University shooting in Providence, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente had been enrolled at the Ivy League institution from the fall of 2000 through the following spring while pursuing a PhD in physics, adding that he has “no current active affiliation” with the university.
Authorities believe Neves Valente fatally shot MIT professor Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, at his home in Brookline on Monday, roughly 50 miles from Providence. Police said both men had attended the same university in Portugal in the late 1990s.
Police said the two cases were connected after CCTV footage and a witness at Brown University helped identify the suspect’s vehicle. The same car was later seen near the site of the professor’s killing, which occurred two days after the Brown University shooting.
Officials have not disclosed any suspected motive in either attack.
According to court records cited by the Associated Press, Neves Valente first arrived in the United States in 2000 on a student visa to attend Brown University. He later secured a diversity immigrant visa in 2017 and was granted lawful permanent resident status that same year. Authorities have not said where he was during the long gap between taking a leave of absence from Brown in 2001 and receiving the visa more than a decade later.
The Diversity Visa lottery issues up to 50,000 green cards annually to applicants from countries that are underrepresented in U.S. immigration, many of them in Africa. For the 2025 lottery, nearly 20 million people applied worldwide, with just over 131,000 selected including family members, according to the AP. Portuguese nationals accounted for just 38 of those slots.
The program was established by Congress, and legal experts say any attempt to suspend it is likely to be challenged in court.
Trump has consistently criticized the lottery system, and the move announced by Noem reflects a familiar pattern of linking high-profile acts of violence to calls for tougher immigration measures, as per The Guardian.
The shooting unfolded on Dec. 13, when a gunman entered Brown University’s engineering building and opened fire during final exams, killing two students and wounding nine others. The victims were identified as Ella Cook, 19, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, an Uzbek-American who had only recently begun his studies at the university.
